Discourses of/on Nostalgia: Cuban America’s Real
and Fictional Geographies
Raúl Rubio
Wellesley College
While reviewing Cuba and the Tempest: Literature and Cinema in the Time of
Diaspora (2006), by Eduardo González, I couldn’t help ponder on the specificities and
trajectories of Cuban diasporic writing in the United States post-1959. González reflects
on cultural production “in the time of diaspora,” specifically: diasporic writers, Guillermo
Cabrera-Infante, who lived and died in London; Antonio Benítez-Rojo, who lived and
passed recently in Amherst, Massachusetts; and Leonardo Padura Fuentes, who still lives
and writes in Cuba. This made me re-visit and re-evaluate the particularities and
differences of Cuban “exilic” and “ethnic diasporic” writing in the United States, parting
from the exoduses post-1959, in connection to my research on Cuban nostalgic texts and
Cuban material culture. (1) These literatures grew significantly during the 1980s and
1990s and have been topic of extensive theoretical work [Hospital (1988), Rivero (1990,
2005), Pérez Firmat (1994), García (1996), Luis (1997), Alvarez-Borland (1998),
Smorkaloff (1999), Quiroga (2005)]. The issues that I encountered led me to ponder
about the discursive styles characterized by or in explaination of a nostalgia for Cuba or
times passed. These nostalgias evolve in response to the dislocations of the historical
exoduses and diasporas occuring after the Cuban Revolution of 1959.
In this article I evaluate the diverse portrayals of Cuban Miami as seen in the memoir
Next Year in Cuba by Gustavo Pérez Firmat and in the novel The Agüero Sisters written
by Cristina García. By offering readings which focus on the representational discourses
within these two texts, I examine topics that pertain to displacement and nostalgia, while
proposing new considerations pertaining to Cuban American literature, specifically
touching upon texts which feature local geography as a narrative device. I review the
trayectory of criticism which focuses on “exilic” or immigrant versus “ethnic” production
within the repertoire of Cuban American literature. Specifically I focus on the
contributions of scholars, Eliana Rivero (1990, 2005) and Isabel Alvarez-Borland (1998).
I propose a formulation of what could be termed the discourse(s) of nostalgia. (2) These
discourses are visible through stylistic form and recurrent themes within literary and
other cultural texts. This approximation to a nostalgia for Cuba and Cuban ways, is
inherently connected to territorial Cuba, but can interpreted to be symbolic of a
transnational Cuba, given the exilic process that has been so salient during the secondhalf of the twentieth-century and still ongoing. In my proposal, the city of Miami and its
surrounding vicinities become the resources which map the experience of Cuban exile
and nostalgia.
Scholar Eliana Rivero in her eminent and now cannonical essay “(Re)Writing
Sugarcane Memories: Cuban Americans and Literature” (1990) first made reference to
the discourse(s) of nostalgia. She was the first to formulate a distinct difference between
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the nostalgic literary expressions of the Cuban exile [‘immigrant’] writer vis a vis that of
the Cuban American “ethnic” writer.
A Cuban writer tends to be more a critical observer of, rather than a
participant in, North American realities. And she or he will enter more
into a writing dialogue with the Cuban insular past and/or present. On the
other hand, a Cuban American writer would be the younger, more easily
adapted individual, who immigrating as a child or young adolescent, is
only part time practitioner –if at all- of the Cuban nostalgia discourse
(169).
Furthermore, Rivero explains her title metaphor which also supports this distinction.
In the nostalgic discourse of Cuban writers the presence of palm trees
and sugar cane is a constant. It can be said that the words sugar and sugar
cane, and the images created by them, are metaphors for the essence of
what it means to be Cuban. In the works of Cuban authors, then, and in
those by younger Cubans in transition, “writing sugarcane memories” is
an image that figuratively represents the re/creation of mother country
motifs in a subtle form of nostalgic discourse (175).
These parameters, which Rivero formulated over fifteen years ago, have been
modified and amplified into what in her recent book, Discursos desde la diáspora (2005),
she calls“diasporic imaginaries” or what I would claim are diasporic discourses based on
re-creating imaginaries on home and homeland. The stylistics of these “diasporic
imaginaries,” eminent in both the literature of Cuban exiles and Cuban American
“ethnic” o “hyphenated” writers, are still visible in writing today. (3) Through the years,
however, the parameters have blurred and become versatile, creating in many instances
hybrid intersections of the traditional stylistics of each category of writer.
For example, throughout Cristina García’s novel the stylistics of the narrative include
both the Cuban exilic scope and the Cuban American ethnic one. Some sections
specifically deal with characters that are perpetually dealing with exile, and therefore the
narrative is linguistically inclined toward Spanish and/or Spanglish. On the other hand,
some sections pertain to characters that are ethnic Americans or American born Cubans,
yet feature characterizations that frame a neverending fixation on Cuba. Given this, I
would venture to say that the literature of Cuban America has an established evolution
involving experiments in linguistic usage and cultural translation. Certain are themes
pertaining to the way things were, a nostalgia for the homeland, past times, lost times,
and the process of transculturation, all salient throughout both Cuban immigrant and
Cuban American ethnic writing.
My proposal here lies in pointing to nostalgia as a detrimental site within the
discourses found in both of these types of texts. I place most literary or cultural
production pertaining to the Cuban diaspora within one of two general arenas; one arena
encompases texts that utilize the “discourses of nostalgia” as a narrative means to
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exemplify the Cuban experience; the second being texts that formulate “discourses on
nostalgia” in order to explain the Cuban experience, texts like Pérez-Firmat’s memoir,
which establish a critique of the nostalgia habit.
Scholar Isabel Alvarez Borland alludes to these differences in her book Cuban
American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona (1998). She specifies in her
introduction what is most pertinent to my discussion here, the critical importance of
“history within the fiction” of Cuban America. What she labels as “the trajectory of
displacement,” both personal and collective histories, are unique, diverse, traumatic, and
all at once emblematic of the varied Cuban diasporic experiences. Yet the key to the
transfer of real history to literary or cultural production lies in the art of fictional process,
one which Alvarez Borland illustrates beautifully utilizing anecdotes by Peruvian writer
Mario Vargas Llosa on narrative technique. For many of these texts, the “telling” of
historical accounts, whether real or fictional, displays what can be detailed as a dialectic
of nostalgia, or an evocation or negotiation of history. This dialectic of nostalgia is
problematic to frame empirically given that not all texts are wholly or organically
nostalgic, yet the praxis of nostalgia is a feature that is noticeably present in many.
In general terms nostalgia is defined as “the state of being homesick, a sentimental
yearning for return to a past period or irrecoverable condition” (Merriam Webster’s,
1997). More specifically I would add that nostalgia in the Cuban case, is felt as a
community trait, a shared experience, a national form, a common theme, or a patriotic
emotion. Of course, these claims could fall into the category of generalization, however,
fervent themes of nostalgia are recurrent in many a diasporic text. Scholar André
Aciman supports this idea in his edited book Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile,
Identity, Language, and Loss writes “the one thing exiles do almost as a matter of instinct
is “compulsive retrospection.” With their memories perpetually on overload, exiles see
double, feel double, are double” (13). We can say then that this “compulsive
retrospection” is a duality of emotions pertaining to a “lost” time. This feelings are based
on the past. Possibly a past that may or may not be as accutely represented in the
portrayal, one that may, through time, gain mythic proportions.
In Eva Hoffman’s essay “The New Nomads” which appears in Aciman’s edited
Letters of Transit two arguments are made that are critical for this discussion. The first
supports the proposal that establishes Cuban Miami as a transnational clone of Cuba. She
says: “The nostalgia of exiles for their birthplace has undoubtedly often been augmented
by this conjunction of geographic and patriotic longing” (58). This dual connection is
indeed ever present in the life of the exile in the Cuban case. For those that physically
left the island they are perpetually dealing with that closure and adjusting to the new
home, while fixated on their original homeland. For those born outside of Cuba, the
territorial space is many times a fictional space that they have never come in contact with.
Miami then, becomes a second home, a new homeland, a clone of the original, a copy.
Hoffman’s second argument takes this connection and transfers it to the exilic position of
creating texts that exemplify this perpetual nostalgia. These texts then exemplify an
“imagined” community, traditionally featured as “one” monolithic community with one
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discourse. She postulates on the fantasies, real or fictional, associated with the state(s) of
nostalgia:
The nostalgic addiction of the exilic narrative is a psychic split –living
in a story in which one’s past becomes radically different from the present
and in which the homeland becomes sequestered in the imagination as a
mythic, static realm. That realm can be idealized or demonized, but the
past can all too easily become not only another country but a space of
projections and fantasies. Some people decide to abandon the past, never
to look back. For others, the great lure is nostalgia –an excess of memory.
(52)
In Cuban terms no one defines it better than Ricardo Ortíz in his article Café, Culpa
and Capital: Nostalgic Addictions of Cuban Exile. He describes an exile’s addiction to
nostalgia by using a metaphorical analysis of Cuban café:
…the more general nostalgizing practices in Cuban exile literature and
culture. It bears repeating here that, in and out of exile, Cubans are caught
in a kind of chronic and aporetic addiction to an idea, and this conceptual
addiction manifests itself phenomenally in all manner of substantial
addictions. These in turn trouble if not foreclose precisely the fantasy of
linear time that feeds their congruent fantasies of return, reunification and
restitution, fantasies on which they’re hooked, and of which they take
“hits” at least as often as they drink coffee. (70)
This addiction to an idealized Cuba to which Ortíz refers to is in fact subsequently
observed in the literatures of Cuban America. Of most interest to this project is the
transfer of this idealized Cuba onto the transnational geographic spaces within the United
States. Specifically here, the locality of Miami, home to a diverse Cuban community.
In Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s memoir Next Year in Cuba: A Cubano’s Coming of Age in
America the experience of being a child in Miami and later discussions about the city,
once the author was no longer living there, explicitly displays a “discourse of nostalgia.”
Rememberances of things past, in connection to family and his childhood home in Cuba
are transfered to his early days in Miami. However, within the general parameter of the
narrative there are explanations about the importance of territorial Cuba for exiles (and
Cuban-American ethnics) as well a study of Cuban-ways and Cuban-things, all inline
with a “discourse on nostalgia.” Pérez Firmat extrapolates both of the stylistics of
the“discourses of/on nostalgia” while explaining how memory and loss is nevertheless a
commonplace for both. Pérez Firmat writes:
If for my father Cuba is a burdensome fact, and for my children an
enduring fiction, for one-and-a-halfers like me, the country of my birth is a
blend of both fact and fiction. Since my recollections of the island are an
indeterminate mix of eyewitness and hearsay, what I know is mixed in
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with what I have been told. My memories merge with other’s dreams.
(12)
Here the author establishes the differences (and in some instances commonalities) by
which Cuba is seen and felt through the eyes of exile and ethnic participants. What
Pérez-Firmat points to as a “burdensome fact” is the historical aspect touched upon
earlier, yet at once he parallels this to the other meaning, an “enduring fiction,” for the
yournger generations for whom Cuba is a mythical space. By specifiying these
differences, Pérez-Firmat alludes to the forms that nostalgia takes, at once, based on
reality and fiction, created and transferred between individuals of distinct generations.
To describe the feeling of exile Pérez Firmat uses a metaphor that I consider relevant
to the understanding of nostalgia for Cuban Americans like him. He states: “Refugees
are amputees. Someone who goes into exile abandons not just possessions but part of
himself. Just as people who lose a limb sometimes continue to ache or tingle in the
missing calf or hand, the exile suffers the absence of the self he left behind” (22). This
absence of a part of oneself is reflected in the memory of one as a whole, and this in turn
is what produces nostalgia. This yearning for something irrecoverable leads to drawn
out, possibly idealized versions of what was once a reality.
In a first reading of Pérez Firmat’s memoir the most common revelation one may take
is that there is a noticeable degree of nostalgia. However, the author’s claim is that his
text is “not written from nostalgia” and alludes to an exile’s intention of “forgetfulness.”
This “forgetfulness” may be a purposeful response to the complex exile process. I
consider that by “forgetting” what is too painful to remember and consciously or
unconsciously “recreating” a mélange of both fact and fiction, an exilic or ethnic
participant may move forward in their new environment. In this “forgetting” and
“recreating” we can observe the formulation of a nostalgic space, based on both the
memory of homeland or and the new home country.
Pérez Firmat analyzes these spaces of nostalgia by describing how the exile
community has dealt with geography and history. He mentions a Miami exhibit on the
history of Havana. Pointing out that “to judge by the exhibit, on January 1, 1959,
Havana vanished…there was not one artifact, one photograph from the last thirty years,
as if Havana had disappeared the day Fidel’s milicianos marched in” (84). He then
comments on the most famous area labeled “Little Havana” a neighborhood of Miami
that has been predominantly Cuban: “Anything one needed could be found on Calle
Ocho, which is located in the heart of Little Havana…it was a golden cage, an artificial
paradise, the neighborhood of dreams” (82). This quote exemplifies a version of what
“Little Havana” has been for some members of the Cuban community in Miami. For
them, Miami was built on the adoption of the American dream and the collective
memories of exile.
Pérez Firmat then goes on to propose that visitors to the exhibit he refered to could
potentially step outside of the museum onto Calle Ocho, Little Havana U.S.A., and
continue the historical tour of Havana right there in the United States. He claimed that
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the geographical space of “Little Havana became the greater Havana” and in many ways
it did. Through the years nostalgia materialized in a specific urban area of Miami which
in fact created a microcosmic “Little Cuba” right in Florida, imitating certain streets and
store facades reminiscent to thoese existent in Cuba . (4) For Pérez Firmat, Miami is a
place that represents home, a possibility “to breathe, to inhale Cuban oxygen, to let off
steam. Miami nourished my nostalgia and healed my loneliness” (252). Here then,
readers observe the juxtaposition of both fact and fiction within Pérez Firmat’s memoir
genre. Through Miami then, the author’s reality, history and present, was meshed with
the composite of nostalgia, real and fictional substance, on which the narrative is based,
giving texture to both discourses of and on nostalgia.
Along similar lines, Cristina García’s novel The Aguero Sisters is and is not a typical
nostalgic text. Sections of the text utilize a “discourse of nostalgia” in order to
demonstrate the commoness of this romanticized practice for Cuban exiles. Like her first
novel, Dreaming in Cuban, it has a magical epic feeling of transnationalism with vivid
descriptions of Cuba’s flora and fauna and Miami’s glitziness, beaches and residents.
However, the patina of territorial Cuba, of a time long ago, takes precedence. It also
includes representations of the current day Miami Cuban community, portraying it in a
light way instead of a serious manner. The narrative is devoted to the development of
individual characters in their respective landscapes, rather than illustrating the wholistic
depth of the exile experience. García plays into the reputation of Miami Cubans
pertaining to fervant politics and fierce nostalgia in a comical form. With close character
development, García presents a cast of individual histories of mostly women, expanding
their particular circumstances and views.
The plot takes place in Miami, Key Biscayne, and Havana, some occurences
happening concurrently and others at different time spans. The protagonists are two
sisters separated during childhood: Constancia, the exiled sister who first lives in New
York and later in Miami; and Reina, the sister who remained in Cuba. From the
beginning of the novel there are descriptions that define the characters’ positions towards
Miami. For example, Constancia is unique in that she is not representative of the Miami
exile Cuban, who traditionally partakes in nostalgic habits. “Constancia doesn’t consider
herself an exile in the same way as many of the Cubans here. In fact, she shuns their
habit of fierce nostalgia, their trafficking in the past like exaggerating peddlers” (García
46). It is clear then that García intends to include the diverse positions involved within
the exile spectrum. She includes various entries that vividly characterize the community
in Miami. In the next quote she reveals some aspects of nostalgia that are non-traditional:
Miami is disconcerting to her, an inescapable culture shock, the air
thickly charged with expiring dreams. The light is binding too, a sentence
to the past, to her life in Cuba. Everywhere, there is a mass of disquieting
details. The deep fried croquettes for sale on the corner. The accent of the
valet who parks her car. Her seamstress’s old fashion stitching. And the
songs, slow as regret, on the afternoon radio. (46)
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The reader observes how the details of nostalgia are not to the liking of Reina, the
island sister, who comes to visit, and experiences the exilic nostalgia in Miami firsthand.
Her attitude towards nostalgia proves very different than those observed in the
“practitioners” of of nostalgia, and that portrayed in Pérez Firmat’s text.
Further into the novel, Constancia, the exile sister, uses her insight of Cuban exile
culture to launch an entrepreneurial idea. She manufactures products that would appeal
to the Cuban exile market. Her beauty line includes a vast number of “face and body
products for every inch of Cuban womanhood: Ojos de Cuba, Cuello de Cuba, Senos de
Cuba, Muslos de Cuba, and so on” (131). This inclusion in the novel plays with the idea
of nostalgia as a marketed product. Interestingly the image of pre-revolutionary Cuba
resonates with ideas of paradise and beauty, a time lost. In this case it also perpetuates
the traditionally envisioned idea of national womanhood, specifically the idealized
lifestyle of the women of the fifties.
In another instance, Reina, the island sister, experiences the Miami community, el
exilio, and “is convinced that it is the virulent flip side of Communist intolerance” (197).
It reflects the detail of García’s approximation to recurrent ideological perplexities that
occur within the Miami community:
The minute anyone learns that Reina recently arrived from Cuba, they
expect her to roundly denounce the revolution. It isn’t enough for her
simply to be in Miami, or even to remain silent. These pride engorged
cubanos want her to crucify El Comandante, repudiate even the good
things he’s done for the country. The other day, Reina’s vernacular
slipped, and she called the Winn-Dixie cashier compañera by mistake.
Well, all hell broke loose on the check out line, and a dozen people nearly
came to blows. (97)
Indeed, Cristina García has portrayed Cuban Miami. The element of memory and
return is treated differently than Pérez Firmat; there is an acceptance of the here and now
and a move towards the future of each character as an individual, rather than as a
collective entity. Elements of popular culture are included in the narrative of the
characters. One specific element of popular culture is the mention of the Cuban exile
radio show that the visiting sister, Reina, has become hooked on. She listens and reacts
with an interesting train of thought:
A news bulletin interrupts the show. It seems a third rate invasion of
Cuba is under way: a hundred or so exiles in jungle gear are attacking
Varadero Beach. Reina laughs at their preposterous effort. What could
they be thinking? That the Cuban people will welcome them with open
arms? Roast suckling pigs in their honor? Start an impromptu carnival in
the streets? No matter how dissatisfied her poor compañeros are in Cuba,
these exiles are the last people on the planet they’d want taking over. (239)
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García’s inclusion of this humorous situation is unique, since prior to her novels it was
uncommon to observe the honest thoughts of Cubans who might not be inline with
“official” exile stances. Insight into the thoughts of a “Special Period” cubana who
comes to Miami, just for a visit, with a clear intention of returning to her country, whose
ideology she still believes in, is a literary delight. Subplots like this one are fictionalized
vignettes of what could potentially occur in Miami in relation to the encounters of the
realities and fictions of exilic nostalgia.
In another segment García plays with a combination of perspectives on the Cuban
dilemma. She uses cynicism towards the exile community yet demonstrates the
deplorable reality of the situation in Cuba.
In recent years, small propeller planes buzzed over Havana like
persistent insects, dropping leaflets urging a mass uprising. If these pilots
were trully interested in building solidarity with their hermanos in Cuba
(who incidentally were already gagging on propaganda), they would have
dropped more useful items; sewing kits or instant soup, bars of soap, even
decent novels, for that matter. The leaflets, Reina remembers, were barely
suitable for toilet paper. They left tenacious exclamation points on her
buttocks, which despite vigorous scrubbing, took many days to fade. (239)
By lightheartedly portraying the Cuban situation and commenting on the propaganda
by both/many sides of the Cuban dilema, García formulates a satirical text that frames the
exile and diasporic experience differently than most texts. Explaining a reason for this,
critic Isabel Alvarez Borland claims:
As one of the first ethnic Cuban writers, Cristina García envisions
questions of identity, heritage, and history with less anxiety and thus
greater distance from her material. Her novels belong to the Cuban exile
tradition, but for this author exile has had a different meaning than it had
for the Cuban American writers of the one-and-a-half generation. (147)
I would also add that García’s writing is a product thought out by reflecting on Cuban
Miami as an outsider. Her craft is rounded because of her experience outside of this
space; she was born and raised in New York and has lived in various places including
California.
In comparing the ways that Pérez Firmat and García present the Miami space, one
could observe that García satirizes the many sides of the Cuban situation, and includes
the “discourses of nostalgia” as a characterization of Miami, while exemplifying the
“discourses on nostalgia” in characters that are knowledgeable of these circumstances
and do not buy into them. However, Pérez Firmat partakes in the expression of both
discourses of nostalgia while critically discussing the evolution of Miami and the Cuban
American exile and ethnic communities. In both texts, the geography of Miami is as
important as a character, a permanent yet constantly changing landscape participating in
the Cuban extra-national historical frame.
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As conclusion, I would like to review a quote that strikes a chord which I deem
necessary to the future study of literary Cuban nostalgic texts and their discourses. It is
the possibility of a fictionalized nostalgia created by ethnic Cuban Americans that have
never been to territorial Cuba. While analyzing Albita Rodriguez’s (a Cuban exiled
chanteuse) lyrics, scholar Ricardo Ortíz states:
After almost forty years of a general but no less compulsive mourning
Cuban nostalgia is no longer so intoxicating, and much more likely than
not quite sobering. For as recently-exiled a person as Albita this may
make some sense, if only in that the Cuba she mourns in some respects
still exists; Albita cannot, like those Cubans exiled since 1959, mourn
yesterday’s Cuba, “la Cuba de ayer,” which has become an increasingly
abstract concept, the methedrine for a community of addicts who have yet
to realize that they’ve kicked their habit, if only because their supply of
the “real” drug has long been exhausted. Albita’s nostalgia may typify
instead the still-nascent relationship of Cuban Americans to a Cuba they
may actually reach someday, not to return to but to visit for the first time.
Having founded a hyphenated, hybridized poly-culture for themselves
outside of Cuba, these Cubans, and I count myself among them, can never
return to a nation they have never been to. (74)
What Ortiz points to is a commonplace for many of the Cuban American ethnics who
have never travelled to the island yet partake in the memories and fantasies of nostalgia.
For some, a return, yet for others a first time arrival to territorial Cuba may be a shocking
encounter. Given that their acquired imaginary of Cuba may have been a virtual one, the
exchange between the real and fictional may be the source for future texts that
experiment with the discourses of/on nostalgia.
As Eliana Rivero ventured to claim early-on in her critique of Cuban American
“ethnic” literature, “these writers are delving into the mature awareness of their own
collective and individual histories, saying their stories from bisected angles and in
bilingual/bicultural modes of (re)telling” (181). Once again, Cuban American ethnic and
Cuban exile literature is on the verge of change. New literary voices such as Ana
Menéndez and performers such as Carmen Peláez and Melinda López are demonstrating
innovative and provocative narratives that feature discourses on and about nostalgia.
Meanwhile, globally commodified items which fall within material cultural studies also
carry the discourses of/on Cuban nostalgia. These Cuban-themed products (memorabilia,
antiques, sites, etc.), give evidence that the histories, realities, and fantasies of Cuban
America will take many shapes and explore diverse nostalgias.
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Notes
(1). See my article “Materializing Havana and Revolution: Cuban Material Culture.”
Citation information is located in the Bibliography.
(2). I would like to specify the reasoning behind my inclusion of the plural of the word
discourse. The differential uses of “discourses” versus “discourse” within the body of
this article is related to the established practice of referring to the Cuban exile and CubanAmerican community as “one” monolithic community with “one” discourse. It is my
intent to undue that misconception by demonstrating the many diverse discourses within
these communities.
(3). By “hyphenated” I am pointing to the seminal theoretical work on CubanAmerican culture written by scholar Gustavo Pérez-Firmat. His book Life on the
Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way delineates and details the intersections of both Cuban
and American cultures within the world of the Cuban communities in the United States.
(4). A detailed socio-historical account is offered in the book Havana USA: Cuban
Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959-1994 by historian María Cristina
García who details both cultural and geographic changes to the city of Miami during that
time.
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Works Cited
Aciman, André. (Editor) Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and
Loss. New York: The New Press, 1999.
Alvarez Borland, Isabel. Cuban American Literature of Exile: From Person toPersona.
Charlottesville: U. of Virginia Press, 1998.
García, Cristina. The Agüero Sisters. New York: Random House, 1997.
García, Maria Cristina. Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South
Florida, 1959-1994. Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1996.
González, Eduardo. Cuba and the Tempest: Literature and Cinema in the Time of
Diaspora. Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina Press, 2006.
Hoffman, Eva. “The New Nomads”. Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity,
Language, and Loss. New York: The New Press, 1999.
Hospital, Carolina, ed. Cuban American Writers: Los Atrevidos. Princeton: Linden Lane
Press, 1998.
Luis, William. Dance between Two Cultures. Nashville: Vanderbilt U. Press, 1997.
Menéndez, Ana. In Cuba I Was a German Shepard. New York: Grove Press, 2001.
Ortíz, Ricardo. “Café, Culpa and Capital: Nostalgic Addictions of Cuban Exile.”
The Yale Journal of Criticism. Spring 1997: 10.
Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. Next Year in Cuba: A Cubano’s Coming of Age in America.New
York: Doubleday-Anchor, 1995.
_______. Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way. Austin: U. of Texas Press,
1994.
Quiroga, José. Cuban Palimpsests. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 2005.
Rivero, Eliana. Discursos desde la diáspora. Cádiz: Editorial Aduana Vieja, 2005.
_______. “(Re) Writing Sugar Cane Memories: Cuban Americans and Exile.”
Paradise Lost or Gained? The Literature of Hispanic Exile. Houston: Arte Publico,
1990.
Rubio, Raúl. “Materializing Havana and Revolution: Cuban Material Culture”. Studies
in Latin American Popular Culture. v. 24, 2005.
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Smorkaloff, Pamela. Cuban Writers On and Off the Island. New York: Twayne
Publishers, 1999.
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